DoJ did something remarkable when it sought email records of WaPo journos - not from an email provider but from the security firm Proofpoint. Why do this? I discuss reasons👇. DNS records show Proofpoint filtering Post email since 2015, CNN email since '17 zetter.substack.com/p/justice-depa…
DNS record shows Proofpoint server (pphosted.com) filtering WaPo email, which is why DoJ went after them for email data. Experts told me the move is troubling. It signals DoJ is willing to seek info from any company that touches comms, regardless of how tangential. 
"it’s a warning to customers that even if their [email or cloud] provider has strong protections against improper law enforcement requests, the government 'can bypass that by going to a service provider that layers on top of that provider,'" EFF's @kurtopsahl told me.
It’s particularly “sad and ironic,” Opsahl said, that the government in this case targeted a security firm — “a company that would be brought into protect the mail for threats, actually becomes an attack vector.”
BTW, we know that DoJ sought WaPo email data from Proofpoint only because a court document was poorly redacted. Other documents had the identity of the provider covered, but one doc revealed it:
Proofpoint just responded to my ? asking what data they gave DoJ: “as an email threat detection provider and not an email service provider, we only had and provided the DOJ with the contact information at the WaPo and the distributor to whom we sold the threat detection services”
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